Reviews, October 2015

Greek Key —
K.B. Spangler

K.
B. Spangler’s 2015 Greek
Key sends
a trio of odd characters on a quest to discover the origins of the
Antikythera Mechanism
(a real-world artefact that featured in a subplot of an earlier
Spangler book, State Machine).
The cast of characters includes:

Hope
is
well connected, rich thanks to her connections and a talented martial
artist. She has one quirky ability that makes her particularly useful
when it comes to tracking down the origins of an ancient,
technologically anomalous device: Hope can talk to ghosts.

The Birthgrave —
Tanith Lee
Birthgrave, book 1

1975’s The Birthgrave wasn’t Tanith Lee’s first novel but it seems like a good place to begin my new review series, A Year of Tanith Lee.

There were a number of reasons for this choice:

DAW
has just reissued it, so it’s easily available.

I
believe that it was this book that established Lee as an author of
significance; it was a Nebula nominee,

When
I solicited suggestions for Lee books to review, this was one of the
works that turned up in list after list.

The
Birthgrave
is of particular interest to me
because hard as it may be to believe, even though I have been aware
of its existence for OHGODFORTYYEARSHOWCANITBEFORTYYEARSsome
time, I’ve never read it. There as a reason for this, a very stupid
reason. More on that later.

Centuries
after the fall of her great and terrible people, an amnesiac wakes
deep underground. Berated for her people’s sins by a bodiless voice
calling itself Karrakaz, tortured with a glimpse of her own monstrous
reflection, the amnesiac is offered death—but chooses instead to
flee the caverns, into a world populated by the ignorant descendants
of the humans her people once enslaved.

The
villagers she encounters offer her worship. She rewards them with death.

Conjure Wife —
Fritz Leiber

Fritz
Leiber’s 1952 Conjure
Wife,
first published as part of the second and final Twayne Triplet
Witches
Three,
has a rep as a classic horror novel. Now, if you look at the
Wikipedia article on this book, you may notice that all the critics
cited are men. There’s a reason for that … and it’s not just that the
literati doing the reviewing when this book was first published were
mostly men (as was the wont of the time). This is a book that a
certain kind of man might like. Conjure
Wife
is a sterling example of a specific variety of mid-20th-century sexism.

Despite
some early missteps, fifteen years into his career Norman Saylor is
doing fairly well. A professor of ethnology at small Hempnell
College, he is popular with students and colleagues. He’s even
rumoured to be in the running to be the next head of the sociology
department. This is not a big deal in the broader academic scheme of
things: Hempnell is a small town college that caters to parents who
are afraid their children will be corrupted by big-city universities.
It is a bastion of dowdy conservatism. However, Saylor is happy to be
a big frog in a small puddle. Compared to his stodgy colleagues, he
is young, cutting edge, modern. His life is perfect.

Or
so it seems until the night he rummages in his wife Tansy’s dresser drawer.

A Night in the Lonesome October —
Roger Zelazny

A
Night in the Lonesome October
is not Roger Zelazny’s final novel1, but it was written in a
decade when he mainly focused on collaborations. It was the last
novel he wrote without a partner.

It’s
also pretty good, which is fortunate for me because I would hate to
have to write a Graveyard Orbit review of an author’s last book if
that book was … ah … not up to their usual high standards.

Every
year, in the month leading up to the last full moon in October, two
factions—the Openers and the Closers—gather to determine the
course of the world for the next year. It is in their power to
determine which eldritch gates will be opened or very firmly closed.

In
18872, that last full moon fell on Halloween, which, one must
admit, is a very good date on which to determine the fate of the world.

The
participants are not always named, but they are all archetypes with
whom readers will be familiar: the brilliant professor and his
Monster, the Balkan aristocrat with an affinity for bats and a
dislike of sunshine, the mad Russian Monk, the Great Detective, and
of course the Londoner Jack and his marvellously sharp knife.

Stray Souls —
Kate Griffin
Magicals Anonymous, book 1

This
is the first book credited to Kate Griffin that I have reviewed
here—but it is not the
first book by this author to appear on James
Nicoll Reviews
.
Kate Griffin and Claire North are both pen-names for the prolific
Catherine Webb.
I have no idea how to disambiguate this on my website’s author roll.

What
do you do if while out walking one day, you find yourself, however
temporarily, at one with the whole of London, unexpectedly imbued
with the abilities and responsibilities of a shaman? If you’re the
suddenly shamanic Sharon Li, you found Magicals Anonymous, a support
group for the mystically perplexed.

And
just in time, because one of London’s gods—Greydawn, Our Lady of 4
A.M.—has gone missing and monsters are stalking the streets. It’s
just the sort of problem that falls into the purview of Mathew Swift,
the Midnight Mayor of London; Mathew’s solution is to punt it over to
an unprepared Li.

Dreamsnake —
Vonda N. McIntyre

Vonda
N. McIntyre’s 1978 Dreamsnake
is an expansion of the story begun in her 1973 novelette Of
Mist and Grass and Sand.
Of
Mist won
a Nebula and was nominated for a Hugo. Dreamsnake
won both the Best Novel Hugo and the Best Novel Nebula, it placed
first in the 1979 Best Novel Locus Award, was nominated for a Ditmar
and was denied a stab at the Tiptree on a mere technicality (that
being that the Tiptree Award was still thirteen years in the future);
as it was, the novel made the Tiptree Retrospective Shortlist.

Nuclear
war left much of the Earth uninhabitable, although not before the
first starships left Earth and founded the Sphere. Little is left of
the civilization that gave humanity the stars, and what is left is
isolationist. Denied access to the knowledge and resources of the
Sphere, Terrans are forced to make do with what is available on
depleted, battered Earth.

Snake
is a Healer, a wandering doctor who relies on bio-engineered snakes
rather than conventional medicine. Earth is vast, communities
isolated; cultural misunderstanding is inevitable. A momentary lapse
on Snake’s part costs her her dreamsnake and quite possibly, her
standing in the Healers. Dreamsnakes are valuable and nigh-irreplaceable.

Childhood’s End —
Arthur C. Clarke & Tony Mulholland

This
review was inspired by the news that the Syfy network, perhaps best
known for renaming itself after the Polish term for syphilis, had
acquired the rights to Arthur C. Clarke’s
Childhood’s
End
.
The jury is still out whether the Syfy version will be a full scale
abomination, like their adaptation of
Earthsea,
or merely wretched, like most of the rest of their product. Until the
full extent of the horror of this adaptation is revealed, I thought
it would be fun to look at—sorry, listen to—a previous adaptation
by a considerably more reputable organization with a long history of
presenting SF works. I speak, of course, of the two-hour audio
adaptation BBC 4 aired back in 1997.

As
soon as the radio play opens, it is clear that events have developed
not necessarily to Earth’s advantage. The frame: a distressed Jan
Rodericks reports to an entity named Karellen, narrating the ongoing
destruction of the Earth.

Dragon Magic —
Andre Norton
Magic, book 4

Andre
Norton’s 1971 Dragon
Magic
is apparently the fourth book in Norton’s Magic
series. Until now I had never even known the series existed, and
certainly had not read any of the books in it.

The
only things that Sig Dortmund, Artie Jones, Kim Stevens, and George
Brown (or as he prefers to be called, Ras) all have in common are
that they are all American boys and they all take the same school
bus. Even that is not by itself enough to bring them together. While
Artie and Sig are friends of a sort (Artie would far rather be
friends with football hero Greg Ross, but he’s stuck with Sig),
disinterest in bridging racial differences keeps them from reaching
out to African-American Ras or Chinese-American Kim Stevens.

Nagaru
Tanigawa’s 2004 The
Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya
is the fourth volume in his Haruhi
Suzumiya series.

Together
with the other members of the SOS Club—alien emissary Yuki Nagato,
time traveler Mikuru Asahina, and ESPer Itsuki Koizumi—Kyon assists
the determined Haruhi in her quest to find aliens, time travelers,
and ESPers. And by assists, I mean “at any cost, prevents Haruhi
from discovering her own true nature.” Just as Haruhi is oblivious
to the fact her SOS is almost entirely staffed by the very exotic
beings she yearns to find, so too is she unaware of her own
nigh-godlike powers or her destructive potential. It is the job of
the SOS Club to keep her unaware.

Keeping
the “irritating sociopathic Genki Girl” (as TV Tropes puts it)
too busy to truly see the world around isn’t safe and it’s often
unpleasant … but at least it is never boring. Escape from the SOS
Club appears to be impossible, so Kyon may as well resign himself to
his fate.

Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship & In Morningstar’s Shadow —
Aliette de Bodard

My review title for for this is Not
the House of Shattered Wings,
but that is just to avoid confusion. What this really isn’t is de
Bodard’s Harbinger
of the Storm,
which I am holding off on reviewing until its author brings the Acatl
books back into print. House
of the Shattered Wings (part
of her Dominion
of the Fallen
sequence) was plan B until I discovered my Kitchener Public Library’s
copy was signed out.

The
nice thing about being in a mood for a de Bodard story is that
instant gratification by means of ebooks is now an option. Since I
was thinking about de Bodard’s Dominion
of the Fallen
setting anyway, I bought her short story “Of Books, and Earth, and
Courtship” from Kobo and since I noticed her related collection In
Morningstar’s Shadow
was free, I grabbed that as well1.

Doomsday Morning —
C. L. Moore

I
had never even heard of C. L. Moore’s 1957 novel Doomsday
Morning until
an ebook version showed up in my inbox. It would have made a fine
election day review, if only I had read it a bit earlier. Oh, well.

President
Raleigh rebuilt America after the Five Days War and a grateful
electorate has re-elected him five times. Of course, the electorate
might have been nudged in that direction by one of the tools Raleigh
created to rebuild America: Communications US aka Comus. Constant
monitoring and finely targeted media control allow the government to
nudge Americans in the direction of the most sensible decisions.

Now
Raleigh is dying. Someone will have to replace him. Comus boss Tom
Nye is determined to be that someone … but there’s a hitch. Which
I will explain later. Tom schemes to remove the hitch with the aid of
an old friend, the once great actor1 Howard Rohan …

Double Star —
Robert A. Heinlein

If
all goes according to plan, this will be posted on the day of the
2015 Canadian Federal election. On my Livejournal, More
Words, Deeper Hole,
I asked for suggestions of SF novels about elections. I had already
thought of two options: this book, and The
Wanting of Levine.
I received many good suggestions, but, in the end, two factors ruled
in favour of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1956 Hugo Winner Double
Star:
I own it and it’s short. I didn’t have much time to acquire and read
whichever book I chose.

It
turns out at least part of the reason the 1970s-era1 Signet mass
market edition is a scant 128 pages is because the font size is
microdot.
Not
that it would have been much longer had it been printed in a
reasonable font, as the allegednovel
is really more of a novella. Still, it’s long enough to serve its purpose.

A
seemingly chance meeting in a bar drops a job opportunity in Lawrence
“The Great Lorenzo” Smythe’s lap. While the job, from the few
details he gets, sounds like it should be beneath a master thespian
like Smythe, it just so happens that his would-be employer, Dak
Broadbent, speaks the language that speaks most loudly to a
down-on-his-luck actor: money.

Smythe
convinces himself he is being hired as a double for a politician who
fears an assassination attempt. The prospect of being shot at does
not please Smythe at all. Smythe is half-right—he is being hired to
play prominent politician John Joseph Bonforte, leader of the
Expansionist Party, currently the Opposition—but he is completely
wrong about the reason behind the ruse.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus —
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The
Monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus is
one of the great iconic figures in Western fiction; the story in
which it appears is also well known. Unsurprisingly, the idea that a
woman was able to create a work of great significance is confounding
to certain people. Some have reacted by claiming Shelley did not write the novel,
others by claiming that a story that has remained in print for two
centuries is mere trash, the kind of thing a woman would write.
Mountains of nonsense have been written about Frankenstein over the
centuries and now it is my privilege to add a stone to those mountains.

Unwind —
Neal Shusterman
Unwind Dystology, book 1

Neal
Shusterman has been publishing for a quarter century, but 2007’s
Unwind is the
first novel of his I recall having read. I wish I liked it more….

The
Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. None of the
factions involved were able to win a complete victory. The compromise
that emerged from peace talks was as counter-intuitive as it was
inhumane. While the US legal system now considers life to begin at
conception, from ages thirteen to eighteen, parents can opt to
consign unsatisfactory children to the organ banks, a process called
unwinding.
As long as 99% of the teen is used for organ donations, they have not
technically died, only become more dispersed. Everyone is happy!

Except
for the teens who are slated to be unwound. Eh, teenagers, always complaining.

Exiles of the Stars —
Andre Norton
Moon Singer, book 2

1971’s
Exiles
of the Stars
is the first sequel to Andre Norton’s Moon
of Three Rings. It
was followed by 1986’s Flight
of Yiktor and
1990’s Dare
to Go A-Hunting,
neither of which I will review (because they fall outside the
boundaries of this review series1). Exiles
picks up where Moon
left off, with star-trader Krip Vorlund and alien witch Maelen the
Moon Singer ensconced in brand-new bodies—Krip in the body of a
Thassa and Maelen in the body of a small animal called a glassia—and
on their way to the stars on the Free Trader Lydis.

But
they’re not out of trouble yet. From the start, Lydis’
contract on Thoth had a whiff of danger. Nervous theocrats,
threatened by religious strife and civil disorder, have hired the
Lydis
to transport precious artefacts, relics of a lost Forerunner race, to
safety. The destination: Ptah, one of the other worlds in the Amen-Re system.

A
temple insider leaks the news that the priests are sending holy
artefacts off-world. Even as the precious cargo is loaded aboard
Lydis,
angry mobs converge on the starship. Only the customary prohibition
against attacking Free Traders can defend the Lydis.

They
manage to escape from the riot-torn world, but worse is yet to come.
Getting to Ptah will prove more challenging than expected.

The Dark Forest —
Cixin Liu
Remembrance of Earth's Past, book 2

2015’s
The
Dark Forest,
originally published in 20081 as 黑暗森林,
is the second volume of Cixin Liu’s
Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
It follows Liu’s 2006 (for the Chinese edition)/2014 (English
edition) novel The
Three-Body Problem.

Three-Body
Problem
won the 2014 Hugo, despite notable handicaps. Not only had a
translated book never before won the Hugo, two bloc-voting schemes
conspired (knowingly or not) to keep it off the ballot. Only the fact
that Marko Kloos withdrew (for reasons explained here) allowed Three-Body
Problem
onto the Hugo best novel ballot.

That
is a nice story of triumph over great odds, which is rather suitable
considering that Three-Body
Problem
is a story of humanity facing a seemingly insurmountable challenge:
resisting extermination at the manipulating appendages of the
technologically superior Trisolarians. It’s a bit of shame,
therefore, that I was somewhat ambivalent about Three-Body Problem2. Many of the same issues coloured my reading of the sequel.

Prometheus Unbound —
Masamune Shirow
Appleseed, book 2

Appleseed
Book Two: Prometheus Unbound
picks up where The Promethean Challenge left off. While Briareos Hecatonchires recovers from the injuries he
suffered in the previous volume, Deunan Knute is trying to fit into a
police force made up of former cut-throats barely distinguishable
from the criminals they oppose. She’s soon head-hunted by ESWAT
(Extra-Special Weapons and Tactics), less for her remarkable skill
set and more because the powers-that-be (or a faction thereof) want
her somewhere where they can keep an eye on her. Deunan has, as she
discovers, a closer connection to the founders of Olympus than she
had ever suspected.

The
people running Olympus (the city) and Aegis (the world government it
heads) have bigger problems than one survivor from
badside.
The world war was horrible, but it did allow Aegis time to consider
and address the issues driving humans towards global suicide. Not
enough time, it seems, which leads the Council, bioroids all
1, to
consider a bold strategy: apply bioroid discipline to all humans. The
result may not be human as humans of the 22
nd
Century define it, but at least it and the world it inhabits will be alive.

Interestingly,
it’s not the humans who object to this scheme. It’s Athena, Aegis’
senior politician and a bioroid herself.

Athena
finds it easy enough to deal with the council: detain them all.
While they are in detention, Athena and her subordinates run the
proposal through Gaea, the city’s supercomputer. Normally the council
is plugged into Gaea while it cogitates, but obviously that won’t
work in this case. The vast, cold intellect is free to consider the
issue without human or bioroid moderation.

The Matter of Seggri —
Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula
Le Guin’s 1994 novelette
The
Matter of Seggri
won the 1994 Tiptree, an honour it shared with Nancy Springer’s
Larque
on the Wing.
It was an interesting year for Le Guin and the Tiptree: her A
Fisherman of the Inland Sea
and “Forgiveness Day” both made the 1994 short list. For some
reason ISFDB classifies inclusion in the short list as a nomination,
probably because they don’t understand how the Tiptree process works.

The
Matter of Seggri
takes place in Le Guin’s Hainish setting. Perhaps some background
would help. As you know, about a million years ago

Diana
Rowland’s 2015
White Trash Zombie Gone Wild
picks up some months after How
the White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back. Angel
Crawford may be technically post-mortal (since she’s what normals
call a brain-eating zombie), but otherwise her
life
existence
is going pretty well. Work at the coroner’s office is fine, aside
from hints of low-key hostility from her boss, Allen Prejean. She’s
currently sans boyfriend, but she’s OK with that. Plus, thanks to a
little drug she likes to call V12, she’s energetic, chipper, and has
a handle on her dyslexia!

It’s
true she has to steal the V12. But that’s totes easy; all she has to
do is water down Philip Reinhardt’s experimental V12 medication. It’s
not like anyone is going to notice! And it’s not like experimental
medications ever have undocumented effects! And it’s true V12 greatly
increases her need for human brains. But she can just steal those
from work! It’s not like anyone would miss a brain or two or even all
of them.

City —
Clifford D. Simak

Clifford
D. Simak’s City
contains material written in the 1940s, material that wasn’t
collected into book form until 1952. New interstitial material
transformed it into something like a novel.

City
was popular and has been reprinted in many editions. The edition I
own is the Ace mass market paperback, which means it does
include Simak’s 1976 introduction (not included in earlier editions),
but it does not
include
“Epilog,” which was written for the 1973 tribute collection for
Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology1.
(“Epilog” is
included in later editions of City.)

While
it didn’t win the Hugo2, City
did win the International Fantasy Award. My copy is well-worn; I
still regard it fondly, despite the fact that it would seem to be
exactly the sort of city-hating SF I loathe. And the book isn’t
exactly keen on humans either. But it has the Dogs and the Cobbly
worlds, and apparently that’s enough for me. And for many other
readers as well.

Forerunner Foray —
Andre Norton
Warlock, book 3

Yes,
this book should have been featured in my final Norton review. It’s not, because
someone (and I am not naming names here)
didn’t read the Waterloo Public Library entries for Dragon
Magic
and Exiles
of the Stars
carefully enough. That person overlooked the little McC notation
indicating that the books were to be found at the McCormick branch
(which is effectively inaccessible to me). It will take long enough
to transfer the books to the central branch that waiting means
missing the deadline for today’s review. And I prefer not to miss deadlines.

1973’s
Forerunner Foray is
third in the Forerunner series. It’s also the first one in which the
Forerunners play a significant role, three books and thirteen years
into the series.

Ziantha’s
promising psychic powers have caught the attention of Yasa and Ogan,
two ambitious members of the Thieves Guild, and earned her a ticket
out of the Dipple. It’s true that she is more of a valued possession
than a valued employee, but even that is better than a life spent in
the Dipple. It’s not like Yasa and Ogan don’t take care of her; not
only have they honed Ziantha’s psychic powers, but they have trained
her as a thief and a master of disguise.

All
she has to do is follow orders to the letter, never screw up, and
never step out of line and she will be secure until the moment she
has outlived her usefulness.

In
the opening chapter, Ziantha screws up by exceeding her instructions.
She has been told to break into the home of a certain Jucundus. While
there, she is strangely attracted to seemingly valueless curio. She
cannot forget the curio and while brooding over it, discovers a new
psychic power. She teleports the curio to her location. While she
gains the curio, she also alerts the Patrol’s mentalists to the fact
that there is a powerful unregistered psychic somewhere on Korwar. Oh
yes, and she succeeds in alerting her master and mistress that she
has stepped out of line.

The Wanderer’s Road —
Stan Sakai
Usagi Yojimbo, book 3

Labels
matter. If I said “funny animal comic” you might think of Mickey
Mouse, Captain Carrot, or Tom & Jerry. If I said “anthropomorphic
comic,” you might remember somewhat less humorous graphic novels: Maus,
Erma Felna EDF,
and the subject of today’s review, Usagi Yojimbo.
Or more specifically, Stan Sakai’s 1989 Usagi
Yojimbo Book Three: Wanderer’s Road,
which collects short pieces crafted between 1987 and 1989.

Miyamoto
Usagi is a long-eared lagomorphronin living in a fantasy version of Edo-era Japan. There, everyone
is some form of anthropomorphic animal1: rabbits, snakes, monkeys
and so on. Lacking a master, Usagi moves from place to place, having
adventures along the way.

Pillar to the Sky —
William R. Forstchen

In
the past, my main interest in William R. Forstchen was keeping an eye
on his Wikipedia entry.
Someone, I could not say who, appears to be policing the article (and one of its subsidiary entries) to
ensure that no detailed discussion of Forstchen and Gingrich’s 1995
novel,1945,
appears.
1945
had a noteworthy sales record1

and in the Darwinian world of modern publishing, it’s all too easy
for one poorly selling book like 1945
to
torpedo a career. It makes perfect sense that anyone with an interest
in the success of an author or authors who have a dud book to their
credit would want to minimize public discussion of that book. It is
certainly interesting to watch the minimization proceed.

I
am happy to say that William Forstchen survived the debacle of 1945
and went on to write quite a lot of novels. I am even happier to say
I have not read most of them. If only I could say the same for 2014’s
Pillar
to the Sky, a
book about which the kindest thing I can say is “blandly derivative
of far better novels published two generations earlier.”

The Best of C.L. Moore —
C. L. Moore

As previously mentioned,
I am very fond of Ballantine’s Classic Library of Science Fiction.
That said, editor Lester del Rey did have one blind spot in common
with many of his contemporaries. You won’t find many women in
Ballantine’s Classic Library of Science Fiction.

I
note just two: Leigh Brackett, reviewed here fairly frequently,
and Catherine Lucille Moore, the author of this week’s Rediscovery.
Diversion has republished Moore’s 1975 collection, The
Best of C. L. Moore,
as an ebook. More relevantly to this review, they sent me a copy.

Moore
was prolific and well-regarded. She would have been the second woman
to be named Grandmaster of the Science Fiction Writers of America,
had her second husband not intervened. He claimed that the honour
would only confuse her (Moore had Alzheimer’s). But her work has
nonetheless been acknowledged in other ways … by collections like
this one, for example.

Note:
this edition is not quite identical with the 1975 edition; the new
ebook omits Lester del Rey’s introductory essay, 40
Years of C. L. Moore.

The Big Boost —
Daniel Keys Moran
AI War, book 1

One
of the great joys inherent in being an SF reader is that it’s
perfectly possible to find yourself waiting decades between
instalments in an ongoing series. For example, I’ve been waiting for
the fourth Anthony Villiers book since roughly the time the Leafs
last won the Stanley Cup (an event not actually within the living
memory of my exgf). Next to that, the eighteen years between 1993’s
The
Last Dancer
and the subject of today’s review, The
AI War: The Big Boost,
was but a short recess.

2080:
The Unification holds all Earth in its iron grip; the spacers,
scattered from the Moon out to the Asteroid Belt, are still free. The
existence of the spacers is intolerable to those who run the UN. It
is just too too sad that millions of people across the Solar System
are forced to live without Population Bureau regulation or helpful
Peace Force cyborgs (who impartially shoot down criminals and
inconvenient bystanders alike). Accordingly, since 2072, the UN has
been constructing the Unity,
a seven-kilometer-long spacecraft intended to bring the full benefits
of UN government to every corner of the solar system … or destroy
those corners trying.

Having
tried and failed to prevent the construction of the Death
StarUN vessel, the spacers have no choice but to turn to the one man who
can consistently foil the UN and its Peaceforcers: Trent the Uncatchable.

The Year When Stardust Fell —
Raymond F. Jones

If
you’re a North American of my age and you read science fiction in any
quantity (especially via public libraries), then the odds are pretty
good that you encountered at least a few of the Winston Science Fiction juveniles and you would be familiar with this logo.

I had toyed with the idea of reviewing the whole line, but I
discovered, to my great annoyance, that there are almost forty books
in the line and not one of them was written by a woman. Doing such a
series would also do deplorable things to the gender
ratio
stats for my reviews1.

Instead,
I decided to pick one example to give an idea of what the line was
like. It was tough to decide between Raymond F. Jones’ 1958 The
Year When Stardust Fell
and Five
Against Venus, Philip
Latham’s 1952 epic tale of a thinly disguised Robinson family2 who
aim for the Moon but end up on Venus, where they encounter man-bats.
I
really liked the man-bats, and the notion of a Swiss family Robinson
in SPAAACE was … ah … deliciously predictable. I finally decided
that the Jones novel was more influential.

Breed to Come —
Andre Norton

The
People who take center stage in Norton’s 1972 Breed
to Come
have only a vague idea of who they are or where they came from.
Centuries earlier, Demons ruled the world. Then their hubris both
doomed the Demons and raised their victims—the feline People, the
porcine Tuskers, the ratlike Rattons, and the canine Barkers—from
mere animals to people. Or so Furtig of the People has been taught
since he was a cub.

As
far as Furtig knows, the most serious problem facing him is the need
to prove himself to those
who choose,
the females of breeding age of the tribe. I regret to report that
this effort will not go all that well for Furtig, who is brave and
smart—but not especially adept at the sort of hand-to-hand contest
that is one of the customs of his people.

The
good news is, having his head handed to him by a much larger Person
isn’t close to worst thing that will happen to Furtig by the end of
the book. Not only will his forlorn journey of exploration leave him
a prisoner of the foul Rattons, but the Demons
are at last returning home….

Duty After School —
Ha Il-Kwon

This
week’s unexpected discovery is Ha Il-Kwon’s webtoon Duty
After School,
recommended in one of the many, many, very long comment threads over
File770, in the
context of “works worthy of a Hugo.” I had planned to limit
myself to a quick glance, which is how my archive binges always begin….

Being
a high school student is stressful enough; if you’re not swotting to
pass university entrance exams, you’re probably trying to figure out
what real world job to try for after graduation. And you have to deal
with crushes, friendships, and the adolescent pecking order. Happily
for Chi Kim and his fellow students of Sungdong high school, life
hands them an effective distraction.